Biggest Bonuses of the Decade

Executive compensation - particularly bonuses - has been the source of much fury both on Capitol Hill and on Main Street. The Obama administration has also set it sights on these pay packages, most recently by cracking down on executive compensation at bailed-out firms.

Given the attention being paid to multi-million dollar paydays, CNBC.com enlisted the help of Equilar, an executive compensation research firm, to find out which executives received the most massive bonus payouts of the decade.

By Brooke SopelsaPosted 29 Oct 2009

Methodology:Equilar looked at the named executive officers among the Russell 3000 companies that received a bonus over the last 10 years. All values were taken from each company’s proxy statement. Only values included in the bonus column of the summary compensation table were considered. The firm excluded any equity awards not included in the bonus column along with cash distributions associated with ownership in the company.

The following slideshow represents the top ten bonus recipients. Executives who received multiple record bonuses were ranked by their largest bonus amount, and their other record bonuses were mentioned at the bottom of the slide.